Humo

After several years studying in Europe, Grigori M. Litvinov, a "positive," hardworking, and discreet man, spends a few days relaxing in Baden-Baden, where he awaits the arrival of his fiancée. Baden-Baden is famous for its waters and its casino, and all sectors of Russian society "creep down there like cockroaches", from the most radical, noisy, and chatty Slavophiles to the "dead menaces" of the military and the aristocracy, who amuse themselves —for example— by hypnotizing crabs. Litvinov thus finds himself, without realizing it, in a bustling microcosm of the world to which he is about to return, and in which Princess Irina Osinin, his unrequited love from his youth, suddenly reappears with the same force as before, now married to a general and bored with everything. From this double reunion -with lost passion and abandoned Russia- Turgenev constructed in Smoke (1867), his penultimate novel, an intense chronicle of love and disappointment where "nature does not respect logic" and a tremendous satirical tableau that earned him the enmity of his compatriots (especially Dostoevsky) but which is not lacking in a convinced, albeit solitary, instigation to progress and civilization.